July 12, 2015
Ponyville -- Doctor Hooves' Laboratory
Sunday Evening
Quantum worked long into the night. On nothing.
There was little the minty mare hated more than a problem she couldn’t wrap her head around. Idle hooves and wandering eyes only brought back disturbing memories of Canterlot, so she ignored the ruin of Ponyville as best she could and set her mind instead on any menial task she could find. Every sprocket in Doctor Hooves’ lab was well-oiled; every diode checked and rechecked; every device she could find that wasn’t too old for her to understand taken apart and put back together again. Desperate not to run out of things to do, she even took up a mop and made a section of the floor shine twice over, until a smacking sensation from behind caused her to jump with alarm.
Glancing back, she found herself rump to rump with the gray, muffin-bearing lab assistant, who was holding another mop and going about the same toil. Derpy grinned and stuck out her tongue playfully. Quantum resisted the urge to adjust the glasses she wasn’t supposed to be wearing, blushed, and turned her attention to the starry sky beyond the window, blemished with clouds bearing every conceivable type of precipitation.
“What time is it?” She asked absently, realizing she’d long since lost track.
“Uhhh…” Derpy glanced in the same direction, and then turned back to Quantum with a satisfied look on her muzzle. “Nighttime. Why?”
Quantum opened her mouth, but quickly thought the better of continuing such a conversation in her current company. She made to move away, but realized with a jerking sensation that she was…rooted to the spot, her rump now stuck to Derpy’s.
“Oh you have got to be—” Quantum cursed at her own behind, narrowing her eyes at the embarrassing mare-to-mare connection. She began pulling and yanking with her whole body, skidding her hooves on the smooth tile floor. “…just…a little…ngh…more…gah…here…and…OOF--!”
In a flourish, Quantum found herself flat on her stomach six feet away, her cheek mooshed against the cold, unrelenting tile. She’d spun halfway around during her short flight, and from her new vantage she could see Derpy’s bucking hind leg extended outward. The gray pegasus was still looking over her shoulder and grinning lopsidedly.
“Gee Doc, you act like you didn’t see it coming this time,” Derpy observed.
“Right…” Quantum muttered, getting to her hooves, “I have a real problem with anticipating being kicked in the butt…” she trailed off and turned to check her rump. The layers of her soft, minty coat were intact, despite the fact that she felt as though she’d just been ripped away from a giant adhesive bandage after having been stuck to it for a week. “What in Celestia is going on…dammit where’s Hal…”
“Who?”
Quantum found Derpy suddenly muzzle to muzzle with her. “Hall!” She yelped, “I said, where’s…where’s the hall! I have to go, uh..go to the…little mare’s room!”
Derpy stared.
“Stallion’s room!” Quantum hastily corrected, “Stallion’s room! In the hall! I have to go to!”
Derpy pointed to the front door. “You told me the bathroom’s radioactive, Doc. Something blew up in there once. Did you get a bad muffin? Sometimes too much sediment gets in them, and I know I’m supposed to watch for that, but it’s not always easy when you’re using a colander and you get those big clumps in there and—”
The bubble-flanked pegasus rambled on until Quantum simply backed herself through the door. She didn’t really want to go outside, but she’d talked her way into a corner yet again and was left with little alternative. A small hailstone repelled off her ear and smacked her in the forehead, jarring her and obliging her to step out from under the one small cloud that was emitting them.
Quantum looked up, this time calm enough to better appraise her surroundings. The whole town looked like a war had broken out, but despite the signs of blood and other puddles of unidentifiable liquids, the were no bodies left to bleach in the moonlight. The conglomeration of random clouds in the sky suggested no pegasi had tended them in a long while, and the fallow cracks in the earth were in desperate need of an earth pony’s hoof.
“Sunrise…sunset,” the minty mare muttered to herself. What did the rest of Equestria look like? Were the princesses still at court? Certainly if the sun and moon were still sharing the sky at the right times…
Quantum wished Hal could just boop a button and whisk her away from this place, but she remembered that the current unstable condition of her molecules would likely cause them to scatter all over spacetime if he and Tissy tried to bring her back home by force. The mint-coated unicorn therefore had little choice but to let herself be carried along by the ebb and flow of realities. Closing her eyes in the face of a sudden spattering of rain that ceased as quickly as it began, she thought about the white pony. The specter who had been there since she leapt into the Accelerator with the intention to kill herself. What did the strange shroud want from her, and more importantly...why was she jumping through its hoops when she had been so ready to throw her life away?
“Hey Doc, what’cha doing out here?”
The voice, which was clearly not Derpy’s, broke Quantum’s introspection and caused her to glance around in confusion until she noticed the gentle slap of the damaged door as it closed again. She re-entered the lab to find three occupants – Derpy, still working at the now spit-and-polish perfect floor; Hal, who was hovering in place over a table, the portal back to 2039 just closing behind him; and a small purple baby dragon with green ridges. The dragon had a small satchel over his shoulder that he unceremoniously tossed on a lab bench. Punching his palm with a fist, he adopted a hoofball catcher’s position and grinned at Derpy.
“Muffin me!”
The gray pegasus immediately nabbed a rock-muffin out of a basket with her mouth and tossed it at the dragon, who caught it without moving a muscle. “Steeee-rike! Yer outta here!” The dragon grinned, tossing the muffin down his maw in one bite which he subsequently spoke right through. “Mnf! Yuu gotsh sapphires inn em thish time!”
Derpy grinned proudly, “Your favorite right? We got lotsa gemstones. Just no bread. Or grain. Or—”
Derpy rattled on while Hal flitted over to Quantum, keeping his voice unnecessarily down. “I don’t need to press a bunch of buttons for you to know who that is, do I?”
Quantum brightened. She’d know her mentor’s assistant anywhere, even though by the time she met Spike he was considerably older, larger, and was serving as a sort of mediator between ponykind and dragonkind. Still, Princess Twilight had shown the minty mare enough photographs that she couldn’t possibly mistake him. “Spike!”
Spike turned, still chewing, “Wha’ss up Doc?”
Quantum was laughing, “Remember that time when we blew that beaker up in the science lab and burned Princess Twilight’s eyebrows off? Omigosh I was mortified…until I found out you set me up! Oh, I can look back on it and laugh now, but back then, geez…”
Silence. Six wide eyes were all focused on Quantum. Derpy dropped a muffin, and the light thumping noise was the only sound in the room until Hal cleared his throat.
“Cutie…” Hal sighed, “…you really need to think before you talk. Even setting aside the fact that nopony in the room could possibly have any idea what you’re talking about, you picked the single worst quip that could ever be picked. Now shut up so I can explain why—”
“D-doc…” Spike cut in, scratching the back of his neck with a claw and looking down, “…uh, what are you talking about? You saw Twilight?”
“I…uh…” Quantum barely avoided rolling her eyes at herself and spun a new web, wondering how many vaults it would take before she’d either learn to cover her tracks like a master or just not screw up in the first place. “I meant…I had this dream last night where we…did that…” she laughed dryly, “…and it just seemed, you know, funny at the time! I mean you know how dreams are! You wake up and you’re like, why was that funny? Why was that scary? Why was I trying to power temporal displacement devices with rutabagas? The usual stuff, you know?”
Spike paused just long enough for Quantum to feel the pangs of mortification, and then finally offered a weak laugh of his own. “Oh, yeah…right, sure. Dreams are always like that, eh heh. That’s a good one Doc! Really!”
With the tone he used, Spike might as well have had the words ‘I’m lying’ tattooed on his forehead. During the ensuing silence, Derpy went back to her work, Spike began fidgeting with the satchel on the table, and Hal went into explanation mode.
“Alright. So,” he began. “We were right about the time and place. Whatever’s happening here is either some freak accident of science or an epidemic disease. Did you meet a strange pony when you first got here?”
Quantum meandered over to a random device and pretended to check it, keeping her voice down, “Yeah. Shypie. Strange doesn’t begin to describe it. She gave me a flower and then nearly crushed my septum while shouting about laughter and kindness. And she had all these butterflies and balloons for a cutie mark.”
Hal folded his forelegs. “Put two and two together. Literally. Do you know any ponies associated with butterflies and kindness, or balloons and laughter?”
Quantum was about to make a joke about the circus, but she gasped softly, and she wouldn’t say it. Her expression was enough.
“Right,” Hal continued. “We don’t...precisely know how, but whatever it is, it’s...” Hal paused, searching for any words that might make his explanation sound slightly less preposterous, “It’s merging infected ponies together. Combining their bodies and personalities, and if that Shypie character is any indication, the resulting chemical mess of smashed together neurons is leaving the resulting...creature anywhere from a vegetable to a criminally psychopathic mess. Behavior likely varies wildly from creature to creature.”
Quantum made a show out of polishing a collection of brass pipes that didn’t really need polishing, and spoke out of the corner of her mouth without looking at her fellow conspirator. “Hal, you’ve told some doozies in your time, but that’s ridiculous. You can’t expect me to believe a disease is combining ponies like silly putty.”
Hal hmphed. “Have you touched Derpy since I told you not to? I know you have, don’t even bother trying to lie to me. If you didn’t do it by accident then you did it out of curiosity.”
Quantum had no reply. Encouraged by the small victory, Hal went on, booping as he spoke. “Tizzy says there’s an eighty-four point five percent chance that inside of a month, the two Hooves’ ponies of indeterminate relation will be just as much of a molecular soup as that nutsy butterflies and bubblegum mare you encountered earlier today. And before you ask me how that will affect you, I have no idea, but suffice to say that you can feel pain. Imagine what it’s going to feel like to gradually have every molecule in your body torn apart at the atomic level and transmorgrified with that slightly ditsy young mare over there. If the effect itself doesn’t drive you insane, the agony certainly will.”
Quantum flooded her mind with questions in order to banish the gruesome imagery. She nodded at Spike, who was fiddling with something that looked like a desk lamp. “What about him?”
“Tissy doesn’t think the disease spreads past ponykind. But Equestria has enemies, Cutie. They’re sure to take what’s being given to them on a silver platter, if they haven’t already. You saw what the town looked like out there, though I think all that was less from some sort of battle than it was just a result of these...new beings simply not having the will or mental capacity to tend their own lives anymore.”
“It’s dark outside,” Quantum retorted, “And it was sunny earlier. The princesses must still be in control.”
Hal fidgeted with the collar of his patterned sky blue and bright orange turtleneck. “Cutie...look closer.”
Quantum tilted her head in confusion, but following Hal’s pointing hoof, made for the window and looked up at the night sky. The moon was in full bloom...except for a tiny sliver of light that was showing in a crescent shape just at its edge. The minty mare furrowed her brow.
“What…is that? The moon can’t do that.”
“The other side is the sun,” Hal said gravely. “According to Tissy the sun and the moon are merged just as much as these ponies are. And it’s just rotating up there, bathing one half of everything in sunlight while the other half gets the dark of night. Did you happen to notice the lengthening of shadows during the day? I bet if you look tomorrow, you’ll see them moving differently.”
Hal was going on as though he was lecturing to an advanced astronomy class. Cutie shot him a look, melting the small smile that the natural curiosity of a scientist had graced his lips with.
“What am I supposed to do?” Quantum swallowed. “Wait around until my molecules rip apart?”
Hal only shrugged. “I’d be looking for a cure, if I were you. Before you go insane.”
“I’m a theoretical quantum mechanic, not a doctor!” Quantum shouted, gesturing so wildly with a foreleg that she sent a few empty cans of dubious origin clattering loudly to the floor. “Where do I even begin!? It’s one thing to learn to walk like I’ve had stallion parts between my legs all my life or count cards in a poker game, but you’re asking me to cram thousands of hours of anatomy, physiology, internship, medical science, and epidemiological research into what, a few weeks? And the whole time I could end up gradually cracking up in the head and screaming in pain while my body merges with that googly-eyed rock baker over there!?” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling dramatically, now addressing the absent white pony, “You have got to be kidding this time! I dunno what you’re really expecting of me, but do you think I’m Starswirl the Bearded or something!? This is impossible!”
Quantum finally noticed the urgent message her ears were sending her, one that she’d heard moments before as well. Silence. She turned to find her two tangible companions staring at her again. Derpy glanced down, a dismayed and hurt look on her face, while Spike just shook his head.
“We gotta do something, Doc!” Spike, sitting on the edge of a table and kicking his legs, sounded as though he was chancing into a topic none of them had dared touch on yet. “We gotta do something or everypony’s gonna end up…y-you know. Like…like Twilight…and all my friends…” The little dragon hung his head.
Quantum felt shame, and approached the pair with her eyes averted as well, focusing instead on the satchel still lying on the table.
“I’m…sorry. Both of you.” She reached out a hoof and touched Derpy’s mane lightly, just patting her a bit like a dog, but the bubbly mare brightened instantly. “The rocks are…great. A-and you’re right Spike.” She took a breath, forcing her emotions down. “What’cha got in here?”
Spike, forgetting his melancholy, grinned and started rummaging. “Oh you know, whatever I can find that we might be able to use! Like this!” He pulled out a small petunia plant in a basket, “Or this!” Next emerged an empty pie plate with crumbs in it. Spike ahemed, “I ate the pie, sorry. But it was pretty wormy and for some reason ponies get sick when that happens. Hey, how about this!?” He yanked out a large rusty spring, inspected it, scowled, and then tossed it over his shoulder, where it bonked an oblivious Derpy on the head. “…nah maybe not that. But heyyyy, I got this too!”
And on went the introduction to useless piece of junk after useless piece of junk, until Quantum began to wonder if the little satchel was somehow enchanted to hold a dozen times its capacity. When Spike finally finished, he looked up, and his expression finally faltered back into uncertainty.
“So whattaya say, Doc? Can we use any of this stuff?”
Spike’s crocodile eyes were as impossible to resist as Twilight always said they were, and the hope fueling Derpy’s expression only fanned the flames.
“Cutie,” Hal said from somewhere behind the minty mare, “We can do this. Tissy can do anything. You can do anything if you put your mind to it.” Hal made tapping sounds on his control device and immediately spoke up again. “Tissy says you need a blood sample from a pony who is already in the end stages of the disease for comparison, so she can start analyzing the genetic markers. I guess that means—”
“Shypie,” Quantum finished the thought.
“Huh?” Spike queried. “…what about…her?” The very name seemed to haunt Spike a bit, but Quantum reached down a hoof and touched his shoulder.
“Shypie is the key. Thanks Spike, this stuff will be very useful.”
“Useful for what?” Hal and the little dragon intoned together, the latter fingering a length of rope that was still snaking out from the satchel. Quantum looked smug.
“We’re going hunting.”